ACT Training

A website fit for Wales' Leading Training Provider

The Client

ACT Training is a leading training provider and provides fully funded training and placements for 16-24 year olds. Their vision is to make a positive difference to people’s lives by providing outstanding learning opportunities that range from work experience placements to on the job training. They work with over 30 sectors, including catering, finance and IT and 90% of their apprentices stay in employment after finishing their apprenticeship.

The Brief

ACT Training wanted to refresh their website and amend the structure to ensure that they were speaking to their target audiences. The new website needed to target 16-24 year olds and speak to the businesses that would be involved in the apprenticeships. They also wanted a bilingual, responsive website that would include their latest news, traineeships and apprenticeship vacancies, alongside course routes and application forms. Their key objectives for the new website was for it to help their overall recruitment numbers and to increase newsletter sign-ups.

The Solution

We have worked with ACT Training for many years and we previously designed and built their website, so we were excited to give it a refresh! We began with the homepage as we wanted to make sure that both audiences were addressed from the outset. Our solution was putting the content for the learners first and then adding the business related content after, as we were conscious that ACT’s main objective was to increase recruitment numbers. Photography on the homepage and throughout the site was key and luckily ACT had professional photos of real people, which gave the website a personable feel. Speaking of real people, we added ‘Learner Stories’ to the homepage as we felt that this content would encourage potential learners to sign up to ACT.

After the homepage had been designed we looked at the rest of the website and established how to refresh the design and content. Some of the content was getting lost on the previous website so we created pages that were styled like a landing page so that ACT could direct their users to specific content. We also added clear call-to-actions and easy to use forms throughout the website to drive newsletter sign ups.

Overall, the new website had a complete reskin and everything was analysed and improved to ensure that ACT Training met their initial objectives, and more! Every detail was thought through, from categories being added to their news section to an improved contact page, so that the new website was a success!

What the client said

“I think our brief was a bit of a challenging one. Not only did we want a re-fresh but we wanted to completely overhaul the structure and navigation of our website too. On top of that we have two very different target audiences viewing our website: 16-18 year olds and professional training/HR managers, so it’s always a tricky one to get the balance right. Nonetheless Spindogs has provided us with a really fresh and dynamic site that is much more user friendly. The Spindogs team are fantastic at listening and understating what we want to achieve and work really closely with us from start to finish to ensure we are completely stratified with their work and the final product.”